big ideas. At some point though, I began to feel that the narrator is manipulating information to conform to his conclusions. For instance, he attacks the global financial system and its architects, and portrays them as causing only suffering. But he leaves out the huge increase in global prosperity that has occurred over the last decades. He says that China kept its exchange rate artificially low, and used the trade surplus to lend back to the US instead of helping its own citizens. He leaves out that average Chinese citizen's income is maybe 7 to 10 times what it was 25 years ago. There's a story here and it's not all good or bad. The characters highlighted in the film are interesting and important - but the film misses an opportunity to reveal something more profound about the mysteries of our times - instead I think it leads viewers to simplistic conclusions that can perhaps be as damaging or more than Ayn Rand's philosophies.

Adam Curtis' recent documentary series disappointed some. Compared to his work on The Century Of The Self and The Power Of Nightmares, it seemed hodge podge, lacking a central framework idea and bouncing all over the place.After twenty minutes of the first episode, I may have been inclined to agree – the documentary seemed to lack focus and carried over the experimental mix of music and image that had been used so successfully for the interactive theatre piece "It Felt Like A Kiss".However, having seen the full piece, I now beg to differ. If anything, the series is a broader and more satisfying development of areas touched on in his previous pieces, particularly Century Of The Self.As with Curtis' other work, it explores the far reaching and (for the most part) unintended consequences of big ideas. In this case, the idea that nature can be explained and entertainingly presents a series of case studies to explore whether this idea is flawed or not. Unlike his previous pieces, the period under discussion is very recent and the ideas explored so varied that each episode does not really follow a linear timeline and the debates bounce from the 1950s to the 1990s to the 1960s to the present day.This is a powerful and thought provoking piece, Curtis never comes across to me as polemical and seems happier drawing your attention that things may not be quite as they seem rather than hitting you over the head as he proves everything you know is wrong.Everything you know isn't necessarily wrong but it may be that you aren't fully informed of all the facts. The opening sequence may be the the weakest of the series, linking Ayn Rand's ideas of Objectivism to the development of moden computing. However, clever dick that Curtis is, it only becomes apparent with the patience to sit through this that the central character isn't Rand at all but a member of her social circle, Alan Greenspan – who, as chairman of the US Federal Reserve became, through a series of unforeseen events, the most powerful man in the world for a brief period.The subsequent rattle through the economic crises in the Far East in the 90's and the knock on effect to the current economic crisis in the West (and China's part in it) is eye opening to say the least. And it goes on, finding short degrees of separation from a multitude of players on the world stage, linked by the rise and consequences of ideas relating to systems. The second episode then explores the theory of self organising networks through cybernetics, eco politics, the geodesic dome, the 60s counterculture, maximum population growth to the Facebook/Twitter revolutions of the 2000s.I was especially impressed with the final episode exploring the theory of the selfish gene, moving from the initial theory through Anglo- American intervention in the Congo, myths on the origins of the AIDS virus, the Belgians role in the genocide of Rwanda through Richard Dawkins and Dian Fossey.Fascinating stuff and well worth three hours of anyone's time.

This miniseries claims to be about machines and how our use of them and misinterpretation of them has not led to the positive results we'd expected.And of course this is true. I majored in Computer Science, and yet my experiences in the "real world" developing and testing computer software have left me wondering whether this is what we, or at least I, ought to be doing, because it doesn't seem to be making anything better, and I can count the lives made worse by the software I worked on (working correctly). So I was perhaps one of the ideal viewers of this program.However, it doesn't seem to really get into the connection between computers and other machines, and the problems we've let them cause. Instead, he takes human failings, and notices that computers don't fix them, and then blames the computers and the thinking that led to them, for the original human problems. He also doesn't seem to give any credit for humans who correct past errors in thinking, which is a function of philosophy and science.The show seems to come off as fuzzily religious. The "villains" famous enough to already be known to the audience tend to be either atheist or frequent targets of religious fanatics. They are made guilty by association with genocide. It's a not-so-subtle propaganda, with the living accused not given any time to respond.Let me just say that the people who carried out the genocide carry the blame themselves. They believed foreigners who told them they were two separate people, despite their own history. They then decided it was OK to wipe each other out. Even if this idea of genocide came from the Belgians, which is unclear to me, they still accepted it and carried it out. That is their own doing, and is on them, nobody else.I've given this a score as high as 6 because I did find the stories of Ayn Rand and Africa to be interesting, aside from the rest of the content. I'll probably seek out more reliable sources to follow up on that information.

An excellent series with important messages (including: an imagined potential for systems to liberate us, ended up controlling us). It's Wikipedia page is informative.Curtis brilliantly and laudably identifies grave problems. But humanity was so foolish to end up with those problems, the series left me wanting. Nothing I'll say impacts his sound theses, but it's Curtis' only series that moves me to other than praise.A primary theme of Curtis' filmography is the tragicomic consequences of ideologies imposed by elites; I love his films so I expect and embrace foolish targets. And identifying problems brings no responsibility to also solve them, particularly when identification is such an impressive contribution. But the fools gallery Curtis necessarily targets while developing the series' theses are so transparent and sterile that I believe more view through them, to depth and substance beyond, was called for. I'm so astonished that their beliefs attracted attention let alone gained currency, and the richly deserving targets are so much more delusional pushovers than in Curtis' other films, that I wanted more. (And I'm more mystified than before by how information processing enchants the analytically-challenged.) Curtis shows both the Internet and systems models fail to deliver things--that it was foolish for anyone to ever imagine they could.(Because I'm not as engaged by this series' topic as I am by Curtis' other best work, on first viewing I made large errors because it's complexity exceeded the attention I paid.) In episode one (e1) I thought Curtis drew a parallel between Ayn Rand and the Internet. On second viewing I found I was wrong. Rand and the Internet share the story in e1. And Curtis draws attention to that, such as when phrasing the belief some held that "computers would liberate us from all the old forms of political control, and we would become Randian heroes in control of our own destiny" (e1@58:17).Curtis shows the Internet couldn't do all the things some people believed it would. And he mentioned that the Internet can do some of those things, but he didn't note that those things it can do were the ones antithetical to Rand, which I think he should've given the attention he draws to Rand and the Internet in his story together, both failing fools.Curtis notes "the Internet had played a key role…brought millions of people together" (e2@52:05) for revolutions in former Soviet states last decade. As we again saw during 2011's Arab Spring, in contrast to Rand's non-embrace of community, online social media's ability to manifest a collective consciousness can play an encouraging role in enabling a revolutionary wave.So while Curtis is correct that machines have not liberated us from traditional political structures, they can galvanize the action necessary to start. Thereafter OF COURSE it's up to us to organize the realization of our vision (since, as Curtis points out, "the machines…offer…no ideas about what comes next" {e2@58:09}). (Incidentally, Curtis' "The Century of the Self" explained that politicians today cede power to the unconscious desires of swing voters, which also deliver no organized or coherent vision forward.) Curtis notes hippie "communes {failed because they} deliberately had no hierarchy of control or authority" (e2@20:33). I lived in a 250-person alternative community of "hippies", and it ran beautifully because like most hippies and non-hippies then and always, we weren't foolish enough to think organization wasn't necessary.(OTOH, while hierarchy is often necessary, marriages can work without one spouse having authority over the other. Had communes remained small enough, and bonding been very strong, people's hearts could've done at least some of what was lacked by, and thus doomed, communes. That might suggest a way forward globally; particularly if Carpenter's 1991 "Pong" experiment {e1@9:21} demonstrated collective connection. Changing people could change politics; the Dalai Lama received an uncommon {anti-Randian} education, and he turned out pretty well; humanity should commit to universally high psychological health/development.) Foolish targets abound. E1's computer visionaries were naïve fools, and Ayn Rand's philosophy is the product of a nearly peerless psychological/emotional infant.E2 brings more idiotic beliefs, such as that inherently lossy models can faithfully reflect reality, and that disturbed ecosystems "would always try to return to an original balanced state" via a purely imaginary "underlying mechanism" (e2@5:03). It's pathetic that Forrester's systems model for the planet's ecosystem "could not imagine a future where human beings, unlike machines, would behave in ways that they hadn't before" (e2@35:35).Regarding the ecosystem model, while Curtis correctly points out it's not true, neither does it have no truth at all. There are interactions between different things in the natural world; they influence each other positively and negatively. The existence of interactions can foster a degree of stability (relative to hypotheticals with minimal interactions), albeit to an essentially dynamic reality (at all scales). The reality of interaction--for example that human actions can cause great harm--makes that part of the ecosystem model of use in understanding, and of motivational use (towards achieving optimally vital results). I think Curtis should've acknowledged these values of the ecosystem model, since they were all anyone who wasn't foolish ever thought it was really right for.{Perhaps asserting that interactions can foster some stability needs no justification. But just in case, a simple hypothetical: a habitat containing grazing animals. Too many of which might cause dramatic population decline, for example from increased risk of epidemic or from stripping the habitat; later (after the epidemic ends or the habitat recovers) the grazers' population might soar. But add to this hypothetical a different animal that preys successfully enough upon the grazing animals to lower such risks, and both the habitat and grazing animal population could gain relative stability.} The series is so densely packed that little could've been added without requiring another part, but with another part I think it could've been substantially stronger. I can't fault Curtis, but I also can't say that all that it did prevented me from feeling more was called for.